


Eldest

by redhourglass



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Dean Winchester's 40th Birthday, Dean has mixed feelings about turning 40, Gen, but not too heavy angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-03
Updated: 2019-02-03
Packaged: 2019-10-21 21:32:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 730
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17650253
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/redhourglass/pseuds/redhourglass
Summary: Dean's fortieth hits him like a shot of rock salt to the chest. Honestly, he didn't even realize it was his birthday, and now he doesn't know how to feel, let alone if he even wants to.





	Eldest

**Author's Note:**

> Don't watch this show much anymore, but I still have a strong attachment to this character and wanted to write something for his big 4-0. Thanks for sticking around, pal. ♡

* * *

 

Dean’s fortieth hits him like a shot of rock salt to the chest.

Between all the mundane things they do, hunting, and the lack of celebrating in the past, he doesn’t realize it’s his birthday until he’s writing the date on a piece of paper. _To document his mental health,_ said the woman with a ghost problem they’d helped a few months back. She’d handed him a journal. She’d been a psychologist. He stared down at it after she’d given it to him, not knowing what to do with it, if he should throw it away or toss it in a box somewhere to collect dust. He ended up shoving it in the top drawer of his nightstand—forgot about it, actually, until nearly two months later when he’d been having the same nightmare for a week and couldn’t sleep. The journal contains the whole story; he doesn’t want to repeat it.

He has the same journal open in front of him as he lays on his bed. A few entries are scattered between the months. He begins the newest entry as he always does, with a fine ink pen and a quick jot-down of the date in the place of a title.

  _ **JANUARY  24, 201**_

He stops before he can finish writing the year, staring, wondering, for a second, why the date feels strangely familiar and significant. And when it hits him, he just stares down at the page in a daze, tongue puckering his bottom lip, oddly… _entertained_ by his own forgetfulness.

“Huh.” His fingers slip underneath the page, thumb toying with the upper corner, playing with the idea of dog-earring it, coming back to spilling his hopes, dreams, and aspirations later. He’s not sure what to feel. He finishes writing the year with a _9,_ but can’t bring himself to write anymore. Actually, it’s not that he doesn’t want to write. It's what he’s going to write about. He’s changed his mind.

He starts with his surprise at having forgotten the day’s significance:

  _ **I, Dean Winchester, am an idiot. Today's my birthday, and I didn’t even realize until halfway though writing the date.**_

He writes more, just stuff about his upbringing, how that’s probably why he didn’t even think about the significance of today. They just don’t really celebrate birthdays. When you’re always hunting, always moving from one place to another, in one motel or another, the last thing to cross your minds is the date, let alone its significance. They’re always primarily thinking about the hunt or they’re exhausted or focused on something else. Or, in the case of growing up, it was all those things _plus_ they never had any money. So why have guaranteed disappointment when you can have guaranteed not…disappointment…

It worked, you know, somehow. He doesn’t really feel much about his birthday. He might make an effort to drink a beer or something, but he’s not about to stick candles in the first baked good he sees or, hell, expect Sam or Cas or anyone else to make it into anything big. Sam might tell him "Happy birthday," but generally there’s an unspoken acceptance between the brothers that as far as birthdays go, they’re just an _eh,_ like just a shoulder shrug. Because they’re great, but nothing special. To make them into anything special would potentially jinx them and all that, shorten their already profoundly short lives. And absolutely nobody wants that. Honestly, the world might fall and break a hip if they weren’t around to keep it from happening _constantly_.

Before now, it was just another Thursday. Normally, the only thing significant about Thursday is the half-price burgers at the local diner, which Dean was actually looking forward to for dinner tonight. That’s how little Dean thinks about his birthday.

“Jesus Christ,” he mutters, fingers rubbing at decades of exhaustion living behind his eyes. Four decades, in fact. Today is the big _4-0._ He’s practically an elder—at least, in his world he is. He doesn’t know many people who’ve been in the business as long as he and Sam have who have lived to be that old. He certainly didn’t expect to make it that far. Technically, he’s already died over a hundred times and it just hadn’t stuck, but maybe one of these days it will. He supposes it has to eventually.

_God,_ Dean really needs a beer.


End file.
